Animality and Children's Literature and Film by Amy Ratelle (review)

Beginning with Donna Haraway's guiding question of "whom do I touch when I touch my dog?," Amy Ratelle traces the roots of what Cary Wolfe has called "the institution of speciesism" (Wolfe 2) back to anthropocentric Western philosophy, which constructs a strict boundary between superior humans and inferior animals based on thought and reason expressed through language. This boundary underscores anthropocentrism in such books as Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories, where "the subjugation of horses is a part of God's human-privileging design, a design that also sanctions some degree of animal abuse" (Ratelle 21). Inspired by affectionate companionship with her dog Sam—with whom she feels the "family" bond of "significant otherness" (15)—Ratelle's research takes a posthumanist approach to understanding "animality," or animals as subjects, and the ways in which children's literature and culture "present the boundary between humans and animals as, at best, permeable and in a state of continual flux" (4). Because children and animals are often conflated through anthropomorphism as a metaphor, with animals standing in for the human body, she argues, literature "geared toward a child audience reflects and contributes to the cultural tensions created by the oscillation between upholding and undermining the divisions between the human and the animal" (4).

Throughout her book, Ratelle's claims align with the animal rights movement's ideological arguments for legal personhood of all species. Thus, the role of literary horses in raising awareness about animal cruelty gets close attention in the book's first chapter, "Animal Virtues, Values and Rights." Before getting to the rhetorical-literary exegesis, she focuses on the evolution of philosophical as well as political thought on animal rights, including William Blake's poem "The Fly," Jeremy Bentham's philosophical questions about the abilities of animals to reason, Rousseau's musings on class and species, and various anti-cruelty laws. This becomes the backdrop for discussion of how children's literature "from an animal's-eye view is key to understanding the way in which the rhetoric around not only class, but also race, sexuality and gender was played out in part against the backdrop of the anti-cruelty movement" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (25). Her primary text set for analysis includes the anonymous Memoirs of Dick, the Little Poney, Supposed to Be Written by Himself (1799), Anna Sewell's Black Beauty (1877), and Enid Bagnold's National Velvet (1935). These texts critique domestic animal servitude and invite young readers into a companionate interspecies relationship based on interdependence and equality.

The second chapter, "Contact Zones, Becoming and the Wild Animal Body," focuses on the figure of the wolf through history and examines the "conceptual blur between the wild and domestic as guises for the savage and the civilized" in literature and film (42). She begins by touching on folklore, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the wild animal adventure tale of the late nineteenth century. Popularized by Ernest Thompson Seton, this masculine genre led to a controversy over what Teddy Roosevelt criticized as "nature-fakers" (Ratelle 48) and prompted a defense from Jack London, who had aimed to avoid the sentimentality and lack of natural accuracy in the anthropomorphism of Black Beauty, The Jungle Book, and other popular animal stories. Ratelle reads the Call of the Wild and White Fang as a vision of posthumanity presaging what Jeffrey Moussaleff Masson proposes as "a becoming with, a model of interspecies engagement based on mutual respect and attention" (Ratelle 54). The chapter ends with a brief discussion of Hayao Miyazaki's film Princess Mononoke (1997).

The first two chapters set the tone and structure for the remainder of the book, as each chapter introduces its claims about children's literature and film with a rich exploration of historical, philosophical, and cultural background intertwined with contemporary conversation between posthumanist theorists of animality and animal studies, followed by an unpacking of Ratelle's arguments in readings of works often experienced by children. The third chapter...